Happier than God

A faith journey is a strange thing; at least mine is. I muddle along a dark forest path experiencing another ‘dark night of the soul’ and finally, breaking out into a sun filled clearing, I find other folks who’ve been there a long time. What took me so long? How depressing. Still, it’s a little invigorating to know I’m one of relatively few.

I just finished a book by Neale Donald Walsch titled, “Happier than God.”Walsch is the author of the bestselling “Conversations with God” series of books. I read at least one of his books and found his writing to be breezy and stimulating.After reading “Happier than God” though, I was left with two uncomfortable feelings. One: This is a book that could have easily been a pamphlet. The main points are enough to fill one or two pages but his ideas are padded with extraneous twaddle in order to make it book length. I found the constant doublespeak and double negative through the first chapters to be very annoying; as if being confusing is scholarly. Rather than being his normal breezy, I would sum up much of the book as flatulent. The second feeling I had was that of good old déjà vu. Here I was, recently making a discovery only to now find I’m far from the first; again! I felt like Alfred Wallace to Walsch’s Charles Darwin. (Wallace and Darwin both had very similar theories of evolution and when each discovered the other’s theory, there was a rush to publish which, of course, Darwin won which is why you associate evolution with the name Darwin and not Wallace). Here was Neale Donald Walsch telling people how we are all God. He even says how God experiences the physical/emotional aspects of life through us! Hey! I said pretty much the same things in my last blog!

Once the déjà vu subsided, I realized that despite the shortcomings I perceived in his book, Walsch actually did make a good point. He holds that if we all reject negativism and look for the good, or really, just suck up the bad, knowing in our heart that there is good contained somewhere in there, then we will become happier. Since creation, as a whole, can’t have perfect happiness (it has to include unhappiness too), therefore God is not perfectly happy; so the closer we individually come to being perfectly happy, the closer we are to becoming ‘happier than God.’ Walsh also includes 17 steps to help one become happier than God. I suppose these 17 steps are there as a basis for the book’s spin off seminars and video courses.

After I got over my pout, I realized there was some wonder in all of this. It concerns Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. I have mentioned before the experiments done with rats in a complicated maze. The rats were put into this maze and were carefully observed to see how long it would take them to solve it. It took a long time. Once solved by one rat though, they could all manoeuvre their way through it quickly. Some time later, the experiment was tried on a different continent to compare results. Well, the rats in the second experiment solved the maze fast. Jung put this down to the new rat knowledge being shared subconsciously through the species, spreading from one to the other like flu. This subconscious network had allowed the second group of rats to make more intelligent decisions when confronted with solving the maze. Humanity too has a collective unconscious network. My thoughts had tapped into the increase in knowledge within the human collective unconscious. No doubt Walsch experienced the same phenomenon. I feel thrilled to experience this and validated in my journey. I wonder where else this particular unconscious concept is percolating… and how often? On a global scale, it must be popping up all over. How long before it reaches a critical mass and becomes common dogma?

Last week I advised people to love wastefully (thanks for the comments). This week I would add to that: Practice being happier than God and try to tune into that collective unconscious.